SOURCE: “‘Das Gedicht aus Worten, die Sie Faszinierend Montieren’: Gottfried Benn's Conception of Poetic Montage,” in German Life and Letters, Vol. 36, No. 4, July, 1983, pp. 329-46.

In the following essay, Manyoni discusses Benn's unique use of the technique of “montage” in his poetry.

In view of the significance Benn's practice of poetic montage demonstrably held for the younger generation of poets in West Germany, it would have been of value to us had he offered a more detailed exposition of his understanding of montage than he appears to have done. Among his numerous and often repetitive utterances on ‘Artistik’ and ‘the modern poem’, explicit references to montage are uncharacteristically sparse. ‘Montage’ is first mentioned in the essay ‘Nach dem Nihilismus’ (1932) where modern man is branded as a ‘flachschichtig(er) Montagetyp’ (3, 716);¹ one of the ‘Drei Alte Männer’ (1948) scoffs at ‘Monteure’, ‘Streckenarbeiter (mit) Saisonaufträge(n)’ who, unlike truly creative...